Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

toonk.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 480 posts

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#241

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

growse wrote: post #230
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a dumb post, to the point I think it must be a deliberate troll. Lol, I'd like to send this to DJ Bernstein, let him know that random Internet commenter thinks that one of his most well-known essays "must be a deliberate troll." Glad HN doesn't support emojis, not enough facepalms it the world for this one.

DJB's brilliance at some things doesn't make them immune from saying very silly things about other things.

I'm not saying he's right in all areas, and while it's certainly fine to disagree with his viewpoint, saying his essay "must be a deliberate troll" is laughable nonsense, especially since summarizing "my new protocol would allow computers that already have public IPv4 addresses to talk to each other" is a silly mischaracterization of what djb actually said.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#242

Post by ta1243 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #240
ta1243 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of NAT66 and NPTv6 are proof that there is still a need for NAT in an ipv6 environment. Maybe not in your environment, but people wouldn't make these solutions if there wasn't a need.

There's certainly a requirement for them, but it would be good to know what the justification of that requirement was before we know if there's a need. E.g. the justification could be "our SOPs say all network traffic must go through NAT", and if you dig deeper you might find that the SOP was written to save money on IPv4 addresses. That would not indicate a fundamental need.

> There's certainly a requirement for them

Thus proving that ipv6 failed in it's mission to get rid of nat

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#243

Post by ta1243 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #232
ta1243 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you). One major problem is dual stack. It doubles the workload for very limited benefit. You have all the downsides of making ipv4 work in the first place. You've then got all sorts of messes like NAT66 (ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT), a lack of clarity on which patch to use (NPTv6 and NAT66 are two different options for the same…

Any solution to the 4->6 transition that assumes that all devices of some class (be it clients, servers, or middleboxes) moved to IPv6 at once is deluded and would not work. There was no way to make the transition to IPv6 without dual stack. The problem was much more that the precise dual-stack approach was not well thought out, when it should have been a fundamental part of the IPv6 RFC itself. Any ISP who wishes to…

ipv6 has been around for nearly 30 years.

> Any solution to the 4->6 transition that assumes that all devices of some class (be it clients, servers, or middleboxes) moved to IPv6 at once is deluded and would not work.

464xlat allows communication from ipv6 only clients to legacy ipv4 ones without the need for a separate stack on your end device

nat46 allows communication from a legacy v4 device to a modern v6 device without the need for a separate stack on your end device

Had ipv6 transition been thought about better back in the 90s then you could have deployed your new subnets as ipv6 only back in 2005 and still communicate with all your older kit.

> That thing is there to stay for 5-10 years, and you just work around it as best you can.

IPv6 is 30 years old. I sweat assets like there's no tomorrow but the oldest kit I've got active today is less than half that. Even for ipv4 only devices, a single legacy subnet would be reachable from my v6-only management devices via my ipv6 backbone via 464xlat

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#244

Post by antientropic »

irrational wrote: post #67
malikNF wrote: post #65

Question for the networking folk here. How can the rest of us help move things over to ipv6?

I’ve been hearing about ipv4 running out and the need to move to ipv6 for so many years/decades, but it keeps not happening. I’m wondering if anything will change in my lifetime.

> but it keeps not happening

The article you're responding to is a dramatic demonstration that it has happened: Amazon's IPs would not be worth $4.5B if we hadn't run out. It requires us all to ration a resource (namely numbers) that should be near-infinite and essentially free.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#245

Post by k4ch0w »

kristopolous wrote: post #99
welterde wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to go back further in time and hit the designers of IPv4 on the head for not making it forward compatible. IPv6 is as backward compatible as is possible within this constraint. You can embed IPv4 space within IPv6, there is NAT64, tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 and many other transition technologies. It's not possible to design a protocol that is any more backwards-compatible.

Vint Cerf has called the decision of it being 32 bits as silly and arbitrary, like having a car odometer with 40 digits. If he had pushed for more, he thought nobody would have taken him seriously. The idea of 32 becoming scarce was laughable. Also the complaint about ipv6 isn't a technical one, it's a usability one. Extending it to 48 bits would have been easy enough for people - like international calling. Those 16…

I think this is absolutely one of the reasons. Addresses are very hard to remember in ipv6. You usually just have to remember the first 3 parts of ipv4 and then change the last digit based on the host you want. IPv6 I know it has shorthand but still it doesn’t register in my brain the same way.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#246

Post by robertlagrant »

ta1243 wrote: post #242
robertlagrant wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's certainly a requirement for them, but it would be good to know what the justification of that requirement was before we know if there's a need. E.g. the justification could be "our SOPs say all network traffic must go through NAT", and if you dig deeper you might find that the SOP was written to save money on IPv4 addresses. That would not indicate a fundamental need.

> There's certainly a requirement for them Thus proving that ipv6 failed in it's mission to get rid of nat

I don't think this is a useful thing to say. If I keep trying to fill up my electric car with petrol, and get so annoyed that it keeps spilling on the floor that I pay someone to install a petrol cap and fuel tank, it would be equally silly to say that electric cars failed in their mission to get rid of petrol use.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#247

Post by growse »

tsimionescu wrote: post #238
welterde wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to read any IPv6 alternative that can theoretically work or is not just IPv6 in disguise (or something that is implemented in IPv6 in a slightly similar fashion). It may sound like a great plan as long as one doesn't look too closely at the details. IPv4 has fixed 32-bit addresses and one cannot cram more than 32-bit of information into a fixed 32-bit field. But one would need to do that for it to be forwa…

I believe the claim is that, IF IPv6 had been a much more minor modification of IPv4, including just a change to the packet structure to have a larger address field, it would have seen more adoption more rapidly than the current version of IPv6 which also changes everything else about the L2-3 stack. Sure, you would have still needed new devices and that would have taken some years, but as long as the network archite…

> which is the only thing people actually wanted from IPv6.

I'm not sure this is true. There's a lot of warts in the way IPv4 was put together (ARP is a tire-fire of badness for example), and the opportunity was taken to implement those in a better way. Lots of network engineers are very happy about that.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#248

Post by rini17 »

growse wrote: post #206
rini17 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extending address is fully possible, and if we drop requirement that the extended part be individually routable, even simple. But no, someone said we must redo whole stack and we need every piece of sand to have public routable address..so now we are stuck between rock (old fossilized IPv4) and hard place (completely incompatible IPv6).

You're inventing a new addressing scheme, and proposing that we put a bunch of middleboxen in to mediate connecting the old world to hosts on this new addressing scheme. You're re-inventing IPv6.

No, I describe existing practice with NAT where you in fact have IP addresses extended by TCP/UDP port numbers. You could instead move this "port" directly into IP header in backward-compatible way and fall back to stateful NAT only if the counterparty does not support it.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#249

Post by Sesse__ »

ta1243 wrote: post #212
jiggawatts wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments always boil down to these two: "Please just try to fit more than 4 billion numbers into 4 bytes" -- this is mathematically impossible. "Just extend the address size" -- this is an entirely new protocol by the definition of IPv4, which uses fixed-size addresses. The reason for the slow IPv6 adoption is that there was no financial or business pressure. While IPv4 is ubiquitous, nobody individually feels…

The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you). One major problem is dual stack. It doubles the workload for very limited benefit. You have all the downsides of making ipv4 work in the first place. You've then got all sorts of messes like NAT66 (ipv6 was supposed to get rid of NAT), a lack of clarity on which patch to use (NPTv6 and NAT66 are two different options for the same…

> Instead had the approach been ipv6 only from the start, with no dual-stack, having the OS transparently deal with sockets to ipv4 devices by converting to the ipv6 mapped address (:ffff:xxxxxxx), and thus eliminating the need for dual stack from the start, things would have moved far far faster.

This is, indeed, how dual-stack works; you open a PF_INET6 socket and use sockaddr_in6 addresses for everything, including IPv4 (which get mapped to ::ffff:/96 addresses). Been like that essentially forever. The “dual” in dual stack refers to the OS' stacks, not userspace.

Re: AWS IPv4 Estate Now Worth $4.5B

#250

Post by speedgoose »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #231
speedgoose wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I may not have been clear enough in my suggestion. The idea would be to use this unused block as a special block. Not to fill it up with normal IPv4 allocations. See my suggestion as some kind of NAT-PT at scale. With a better marketing name and user experience. The problem is indeed hard because no one manage to find a solution at scale since 3 decades.

No matter what change you make, or how you make it, if you are making more than 4B addresses routable then any existing IPv4 device will not be able to route some addresses, so you will have caused a split in the internet This is a fundamental and unresolvable problem with "making it backwards compatible"

Wouldn't NAT be an existing and well used solution to this problem?
Post reply on HN